Oracle Co-founder Larry Ellison, left, and Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates watch a match between Gael Monfils of France and Alexander Zverev of Germany during the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., on Oct. 13, 2021.
Sean M. Haffey | Getty Images
Larry Ellison, the co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, has been going up against Microsoft to in database software for more than 30 years. He has also had to deal with clients looking to connect their Oracle and Microsoft products. But until this week, he had never made the journey to Microsoft’s headquarters outside Seattle.
He was in town to appear alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to announce an expansion of the collaboration between the two companies. Oracle is placing its Exadata hardware, which contains servers for databases and storage, inside the data centers that Microsoft uses to run its Azure public-cloud service for hosting applications.
Organizations will be able to store data with Oracle’s database software by using Azure, rather than having to install Oracle hardware in their own data centers or use Oracle’s public cloud. Putting the Oracle equipment in Azure data centers means that applications will be able to quickly access data from the databases.
“It was lovely to come up here, said Ellison in a virtual presentation on the announcement, which he teased on Oracle’s earnings call with analysts on Monday. “It’s actually my first time in Redmond. It’s hard to believe. I waited till very late in my career to make this trip.”
Nadella conveyed the significance of Microsoft and Oracle working together by bringing up a memory from his early years, before he managed teams building Azure, the Bing search engine and Dynamics sales software. He joined Microsoft from Sun Microsystems in 1992, taking a position as a program manager in the Windows developer relations group.
“When I first came to Microsoft, the first week, they asked me to sort of get ISVs onto Windows NT at that time,” Nadella said. “I said, ‘There’s no way we can get ISVs onto Windows NT first without getting Oracle onto Windows NT.'”
Nadella said the new collaboration might help companies more quickly move their workloads from their existing data centers to the public cloud.
The two companies haven’t completely given up their rivalry, though. Oracle and Microsoft will still compete to sell cloud-based infrastructure, but Azure is larger and more mature, and Oracle wants to have customers keep using its products even as they adopt other clouds. And there’s nothing stopping longtime Oracle customers from considering Microsoft’s databases in Azure.
The tension between the two companies reached a high point in 2000, as Microsoft was in the middle of its hallmark antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department. Oracle told media outlets that it had hired a detective firm that tried to buy trash from a Microsoft-backed trade group by offering money to janitors working at the group’s office in Washington.
Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and is the world’s fifth richest person in the world, while Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, ranks fourth, according to Bloomberg. But Ellison controls 42% of Oracle’s outstanding shares, while Gates owns just over 1% of Microsoft stock, according to FactSet.
An Electron rocket launches the Baby Come Back mission from New Zealand on July 17, 2023.
Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab stock soared 8% Monday, building on a strong run fueled by space innovation.
Shares of the space infrastructure company have nearly doubled over the last two months following a slew of successful launches and a deal with the European Union.
The stock is up 63% year to date after surging nearly sixfold in 2024.
Last month, Rocket Lab announced a partnership with the European Space Agency to launch satellites for constellation navigation before December.
Rocket Lab also announced the successful launch of its 66th, 67th and 68th Electron rockets in June. The company successfully deployed two rockets from the same site in 48 hours.
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Rocket Lab competes with a growing list of companies in a maturing and increasingly competitive space industry with growing demand. Some of the main competitors in the sector include Elon Musk‘s SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, which filed its prospectus to go public on Friday.
“For Electron, our little rocket, we’ve seen increased demand over the last couple of years and we’re not just launching single spacecraft — these are generally entire constellations for customers,” CEO Peter Beck told CNBC last month.
He said the company is producing a rocket every 15 days.
Beck, a New Zealand-native, founded the company in 2006. Since its debut on the Nasdaq in August 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, the Long Beach, California-based company’s market value has swelled to more than $19 billion.
A view of the Pentagon on December 13, 2024, in Washington, DC. Home to the US Defense Department, the Pentagon is one of the world’s largest office buildings.
Daniel Slim | Afp | Getty Images
The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday said it’s granting contract awards of up to $200 million for artificial intelligence development at Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI.
The DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said the awards will help the agency accelerate its adoption of “advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.” The companies will work to develop AI agents across several mission areas at the agency.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, the DoD’s chief digital and AI officer, said in a release.
Elon Musk’s xAI also announced Grok for Government on Monday, which is a suite of products that make the company’s models available to U.S. government customers. The products are available through the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule, which allows federal government departments, agencies, or offices to purchase them, according to a post on X.
OpenAI was previously awarded a year-long $200 million contract from the DoD in 2024, shortly after it said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
In June, the company launched OpenAI for Government for U.S. federal, state, and local government workers.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said he plans to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into artificial intelligence compute infrastructure, and that Meta plans to bring its first supercluster online next year.
A supercluster is a large, complex computing network that’s designed to train advanced AI models and handle their workloads.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “I’m looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!”
Zuckerberg said Meta’s first supercluster is called Prometheus, and that the company is building several other multi-gigawatt clusters. One cluster, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to five gigawatts over several years, he said.
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Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. He announced a new organization in June called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers.
Zuckerberg had grown frustrated with Meta’s progress in AI, especially after the release of its Llama 4 AI models in April received a lukewarm response from developers. He is revamping Meta’s approach to better compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google.
“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg wrote Monday.